Ryan, I think you missed a possible purpose for the R5 M230.It's a contender to Crossfire with Kaveri and get a substantial performance boost in 3D.Even more now that Crossfire is exclusively made through PCI-Express and Mantle should give it increased control over frame pacing.

Perhaps a performance boost that is substantial enough to hold its own against Broadwell GT3e at a much lower price point.Reply

Dual graphics poor performance isn't about mixing VLIW4 and GCN. It performs far from great with a pair of VLIW4 graphic engines. It is a driver issue. New symmetrical bridgless crossfire is one thing, asymmetrical dual graphics is another beast.

I won't expect much since llano, trinity and richland poor performance in this area. But, I truly want it fixed and operational. It would kill that unpleasant scenario that is enduring since 2011: Ins most cases, a cheap Intel CPU paired with cheap dGPU performs better in games for the same money of an AMD APU.Reply

Err, I've seen quite a few benches that show it provides a big boost to FPS in many cases these days using Richland. Was Llano the last time you looked? Anyway, where they need work is frame pacing - and that remains primarily a driver issue. Unfortunately they're spending most of their frame pacing efforts right now on traditional crossfire, so it will probably remain an issue to some degree for the foreseeable future of hybrid crossfire.

However, they've been making steady improvements to hybrid crossfire performance, and frame pacing is now very much on their radar across the board. I'm not saying that this is the generation that fixes everything, but I suspect there will be some improvement, and it will continue to get better with time. I would agree that one major use of this GPU would be crossfire with mobile Kaveri.Reply

but you forget that from 680m to 780m and to 880m: we see an amazing increase in performance. And if not for the top end cards but the mid range as well. And power usage is drasticly better...AMD on the other hand does...nothing interesting here.Reply